I was working my way through my inbox this morning when I came across this piece . Conservatives, I was told, just love war:
Violence, the conservative maintains, is one of the experiences in life that makes us feel alive, and violence, particularly warfare, is an activity that makes life, well, lively.
This attitude is traced back to an early essay by Edmund Burke on the beautiful and the sublime. I’ll leave it to better Burkeans than I to judge whether the author has gotten Burke right, but I’m struck by the echoes of Nietzscheanized Hegelianism (Kojeve and Fanon, not to say Fukuyama) in his characterization of Burke’s sublime. From there, he moves to Carl Schmitt, making the transition via this argument:
Rule may sometimes be sublime—our power is not always so assured orsecure—but violence is more sublime. Most sublime of all is when the two are fused, when violence is performed for the sake of creating, defending, or recovering a regime of domination. But history does not always present such opportunities. The conservative must settle for the lesser good of war, pure and simple. Thus, when Carl Schmitt declares that the fundamental distinction in politics to which “all actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy,” he merely formalizes an axiom that has been stirring the conservative mind for nearly a century.
Whew! From there we move to David Brooks and the neocons, and then on to the current Pledge to America , which—curiously or suspiciously, take your pick—doesn’t give much attention to foreign policy, let alone war. But this is either propaganda for the party of war or evidence of something else: it is “the flip side of the Burkean coin.” Sublimity “depends upon obscurity”: “Get to know anything, including violence, too well, and it loses the thrill you got when it was just an idea.” It’s Burkean, in other words, to be a neocon chickenhawk.
I’m sorry (not really!) that the author didn’t have room to develop his argument regarding the other figures who merit a mention in his narrative from Burke to the neocons: Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Leo Strauss. But perhaps they’re inconvenient for other reasons: Roosevelt and Churchill weren’t exactly chickenhawks, and Strauss was deeply critical of Schmitt’s concept of the political. To be sure, there are some conservatives who admire all three (remember “national greatness conservatism,” whose principal proponents wrote for The Weekly Standard ?), but they hardly cover the whole range of conservatism.
But that’s only the tip of the iceberg of what’s wrong with this essay. I’ve lost count of the ways that I object to it. For starters, isn’t it possible to admire, with, say, Horace and Lincoln, patriotic self-sacrifice without leaping to the conclusion, with Nietzsche, that a good war hallows any cause? And then there are the three legs of the conservative stool. Libertarians aren’t exactly warmongers, last I checked. (They may not exactly be conservatives, but that’s not my point right now.) Social or religious conservatives may be called to defend the innocent, but they trace their tradition back a bit further than the young Burke. The national security conservatives may come closet to the caricature drawn here, but their attention is drawn to threats that are arguably real, neither abstract nor universal. One can regard them as spoiling for a fight only if one takes a highly implausible view of the world around us.
In short, the brush with which the author paints is laughably broad. His argument is tendentious, with many leaps of logic, or rather illogic. I’m told he has a forthcoming collection of essays on conservatism, to be published by Oxford University Press. I doubt that I’ll learn anything from it, but perhaps I’ll have a go at it if and when I’m suffering from low blood pressure or narcolepsy.
By the way, for a different kind of unfavorable response, see Jonah Goldberg’s post over at The Corner.
